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dutchwhizzman (817898) writes "The surviving members of Monty Python have announced they will make a new movie. It will be titled "Absolutely Anything". Graham Chapman won't be there to join them anymore, but they think the movie will still be in the spirit of "Life of Brian", "The meaning of Life" and other movies they made in the past."Link to Original Source

noring (2521376) writes "The migration to IPv6 has been slow. A Norwegian ISP has observed in the past that a female taking off some of her clothes can do wonders for the penetration of new technology. They have created a "Killer App" in a humoristic attempt to spark the interest for IPv6 among end-users. http://ip6.no/index-en.html"Link to Original Source

davecb writes "Think you've mastered the art of server performance? Think again. Poul-Henning Kamp, in an article at ACM Queue, finds an off-by-ten error in btrees, because they fail to take virtual memory into account. And he solves the problem in the open source 'Varnish' HTTP accelerator, for all of us to see and use."

With regards to glibc, 2.3.6 is stone old. RFC 3484 support has matured a lot since Etch:-) Actually you need to go to Debian unstable to find a glibc that's patched to prefer NATed IPv4 over 6to4.

I think my rebuttal of your OS X analysis was a bit unclear, so let me try to make it a bit better. First of all, note that the sentence you're quoted does not mention 6to4 in any way. Second, note the part I wrote about “hits that come through”. The User-Agent is recorded every time the experiment is sent out, not only when it comes in. Thus, you can draw a direct correlation of OS X in the User-Agent string less likely to come back; your analysis was “browsers with Mac OS X in the User-Agent string are more commonly using 6to4 addresses”, which just isn't the same. (It's also true, of course, but the “OS X more often is broken” analysis doesn't depend on that at all.) If you did an experiment which only registered IPv6 hits that actually came through, your criticism would have been valid, but that's not how this was done.

Look at the page -- several Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian) now prefer IPv4 over 6to4 pretty unconditionally (unless you're trying to connect to a 6to4 host, but that's pretty obscure for a web server). The rest only prefer IPv4 over 6to4 when the IPv4 is not NAT-ed.

No, the reality is that getaddrinfo() on most platforms actually follow RFC3484 and prioritize IPv4 over 6to4. (There's a clear distinction in the RFC between 6to4 and other forms of IPv6.) OS X doesn't and uncritically tries IPv6 -- that is, of course, assuming you don't crash into any of the other resolver bugs they introduced in 10.5.

It should be said that if you follow RFC3484 to the letter, 6to4 will be preferred over NAT-ed IPv4. However, that was most likely just an oversight in the standard (the draft revision makes changes to fix that), and most vendors (certainly Microsoft, and most of the major Linux distros, although not glibc upstream yet) has made that change. However, this is moot with regards to OS X, since they don't actually seem to follow RFC3484 in the first place.

You are also wrong in the Airports are the only CPEs that try to enable 6to4 out of the box -- some Linksys models do this, among others. The Airports are, however, most likely the most common. You're also right in that uncritically enabling this is not a good idea; the CPE should at least have done a routability test first.

Finally, you're assuming the statistics here are based only on the User-Agent string on the dualstack hits that come through. They're not -- please read the experiment design more carefully. There is a direct correlation measured between using OS X (as seen in the User-Agent string that fetches the iframe) and inability to fetch the dualstack image. In no way does this result depend on correlation between OS X and 6to4.

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Royal Observatory's 'Solar Stormwatch' needs volunteers to help scientists spot Sun storms — known as coronal mass ejections — before they cause damage on Earth. 'When you look up at the Sun obviously it's too bright to look at properly,' says Dr. Marek Kukula of the Royal Observatory, but 'with special instruments and telescopes you can see there's all sorts of stuff going on.' NASA already monitors the Sun using two 'STEREO' spacecraft that produce 3D images of earth's nearest star, which can show the trajectory of these explosions. However, the sheer amount of data means NASA's scientists are unable to analyze the data as closely as they need — which is where the world's Internet population comes in. After a brief tutorial, users get access to the actual 3-D images taken by the STEREO spacecraft. If a user believes they have spotted the beginnings of a solar storm, they can bring it to the attention of scientists. 'Every little bit counts,' says Kukula. 'I've spoken to the scientists involved and they all agree that even if you log-on and just do it for a few hours, get bored and never touch it again it's all really useful — and helps them to do their work.'"

elucido writes "OFF, or the Owner-Free Filesystem is a distributed filesystem in which everything is stored in reference to randomized data blocks, as opposed to a 1:1 copy of the original data being inserted. The creators of the Owner-Free Filesystem have coined a new term to define the network: A brightnet. Nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away. OFF provides a platform through which data can be stored (publicly or otherwise) in a discreet, distributed manner. The system allows for personal privacy because data (blocks) being transferred from peer to peer do not bear any relation to the original data. Incidentally, no data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random." Their
main wiki page discusses a bit of what this means and how it might work as well. I've been saying that we need this for many years now, if only because we all have 10 gigs free on our machines and if we could RAID the internet we'd need fewer hard drives.

Hi. I work (among other things) with IPv6 in Google, although I was only distantly released to this launch (some of my code was used in the monitoring components). It's nice to see we're getting attention:-)

You're entirely right that at the moment, only web search has an AAAA record. (However, with some trickery, you can get several other Google services running too -- just add/etc/hosts lines to the same IP, and you'll probably be able to run Maps, GMail and several others over IPv6.) We don't yet crawl, send or receive e-mail, or support GTalk over IPv6, and we definitely cannot guarantee anything about the uptime of the IPv6 versions of our services. (We've had a few years to make a production-grade IPv4 network, give us some time to make it IPv6-ready too!) Think of it as the first baby step; although we don't have a roadmap published (we almost never talk about future products in Google) I think it's pretty safe to say that there will be more.

Whether there should be services that are not available over IPv4, though, is an entirely different discussion. If you had a cool service and could offer it to the world, would you keep it away from 99.9% of the Internet just because you could?

IP Freely writes "At this year's Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Philadelphia, conference organizers shut off IPv4 for an hour. Surprisingly, chaos did not ensue. 'After everyone got his or her system up and running, many people started looking for IPv6-reachable web sites, reporting those over Jabber instant messaging — which posed its own challenges in the IPv6 department. I was surprised at the number of sites and wide range of content available over IPv6. Apart from — obviously — IPv6-related sites; they ranged from "the largest Gregorian music collection in Internet" to "hardcore torrents." Virtually none of the better known web destinations were reachable over IPv6. That changed when ipv6.google.com popped into existence.'"